CLAY BENNETT WINS NEW AWARD

Clay Bennett, editorial cartoonist at the Chattanooga Times Free Press — who has won just about every award in season for editooning — has just received the first annual Phillipp “Fips” Rupprecht Prize for Collectivist Hate Cartoon Excellence. The so-called “prize” is the invention of a blogger named (we think) Mike Vanderboegh, a gunslinger who operates a teabagger site, sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com. In selecting a name for his “award,” Vanderboegh has displayed admirable ingenuity: Phillipp Rupprecht, pen-name “Fips,” was a German cartoonist notorious during the Nazi era for his anti-Semitic cartoons fomenting hatred for Jews. Bennett won the dubious Sipsey Street distinction for the cartoon below.

Vanderboegh’s strenuous implication is that Bennett is inciting hatred for the Teabaggers in the same way Fips did for Jews. A stretch, you might think, but when you consider Bennett’s other recent cartoons, you might agree: Bennett wants his readers to disapprove of the idiots he pillories in his cartoons. Or, if he is not urging scorn, he’s at least hoping for derisive laughter. And his use of visual metaphor is both ingenious and uncompromising; his cartoons are easily among the best in any month’s crop.

In giving a prize to Bennett, Vanderboegh betrays his penchant and that of his minions for indulging in extreme behavior: just as they interpret any action by a governmental body as “taking their country away” from them, so do they see any attack on any idea they favor as an act of hatred. Civil discourse with such personages is not just impossible, it borders on dangerous: most of this ilk are avid gun fanciers and tend these days, as an presumably symbolic act, to wear sidearms when they go to political rallies, saying they are merely exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Symbolic maybe; intimidating, definitely. Few among us would openly disagree on a political issue with an armed individual bristling with hostility who tends to shout rather than reason. A loud and threatening citizen undermines the very principles upon which democracies are founded, principles he claims to want to uphold.